On Wednesday, Mount Sinai Health System issued a press release about a recent observational study that appears to show a significant benefit to treating severe hospitalized COVID-19 patients with anticoagulant (blood thinning) medications.
According to the release, “a team of investigators evaluated records of 2,773 confirmed COVID-19-positive patients admitted to five hospitals in the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City … between March 14 and April 11, 2020.”
While considering other “risk factors” including but not limited to whether or not the patient was already on blood thinners, the team examined the “survival rates” for COVID-19 patients who were given anticoagulants verses those who were not.
The results were eye-opening.
Approximately 28% of the patients under examination were found to have been given “a full-treatment dose of anticoagulants - a higher dose than what is typically given for blood clot prevention, and one that is usually given to those who already have clots or are suspected to have clots.”
It appears as though COVID-19 patients who were given anticoagulants fared better than their counterparts. Not only did patients on blood thinners stay alive longer in general, but those on ventilators who were given anticoagulants appeared more likely to survive the illness.
“62.7 percent of intubated patients who were not treated with anticoagulants died, compared to 29.1 percent for intubated patients treated with anticoagulants,” the release states.
This chart shows the impact:
President and Chief Operating Officer of The Mount Sinai Hospital David Reich, MD, said: “We are hopeful that this report of the association of anticoagulation therapy with improved survival will be confirmed in future investigations.”
Anu Lala, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, noted that having treated COVID-19 patients for weeks, she has seen “an increased amount of blood clot cases,” adding that “further analysis and prospective studies” will be necessary in order to establish the potential benefits of anticoagulants in those hospitalized with the virus.
Stating that he is “excited” about the initial results, senior author Girish Nadkarni, MD, Co-Director of the Mount Sinai COVID Informatics Center, spoke about what’s next on the docket:
This study is opening the door for a more extensive study that will be carried out with 5,000 COVID-19-positive patients, where we will evaluate the effectiveness of three types of antithrombotic therapy - oral antithrombotic, subcutaneous heparin, and intravenous heparin - and then perhaps engage our data for prospective clinical trials.
The Daily Wire reached out to the medical team responsible for the study, but were unable to secure comment or quotes prior to publication.
In an April 8 interview with The Daily Wire, Dr. Zachary Blankenship, DO, of St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, noted blood-related issues he was seeing in his patients:
All of my patients have deranged laboratory values, like abnormal electrolytes, kidney failure, liver failure. There seems to be some effect on your blood’s ability to clot and break down clots, which is at a constant balance. And so I’ve seen a ton of people who have blood clots. They’re getting blood clots in the brain, which we call a stroke, blood clots in the heart, or a heart attack. I’ve seen people with blood clots in the leg, too. I’ve also seen patients with bleeding, gastrointestinal bleeding, blood in the urine.
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